Monthly Archives: January 2009

William Eggleston’s pioneering video work, “Stranded In Canton,” has been restored and is finally available, almost thirty-five years after it was made. The book contains forty frame enlargements from the digital re-master, a brief appreciation from filmmaker Gus Van Sant, and a DVD of the 77-minute film itself, along with more than thirty minutes of bonus footage and an interview with Mr. Eggleston conducted at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.

“Shot in 1974 with a Sony Porta-Pak, the crazily careering Stranded in Canton documents a cast of hard-drinking Southerners with the intimacy, ease and instability of a seasoned participants. Whiffs of Southern Gothic are not new to Mr. Eggleston’s work, but here they rise to the surface-fierce, tragic and proud.” The New York Times

Interview Magazine currently has an interesting exchange between William Eggleston & Harmony Korine on their website. Although Korine addresses the same territory as every other interviewer (Eggleston’s landmark use of color, his relationship with Szarkowski and MOMA, his interest in the American vernacular landscape, etc.) there are some engaging insights.

Text by Eyal Weizman and an introduction by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

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“Chicago” is a fake Arab town built by the Israeli Defense Force for urban combat training. It is a place that is familiar to Israeli and American soldiers, but until now largely unknown outside Israel. Chicago stands in the middle of the Negev desert, a ghost town whose history directly mirrors the story of the conflict with Palestine. During the first Gulf War, American Special Forces had their first taste of the Middle East here. “Rehearsals” included a failed attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein, the Battle of Fallujah and, most recently, the evacuation of the Gaza settlements. Complete with homes, shops, streets, mosques and a refugee camp, Chicago represents an Israeli military fantasy: an Arab town devoid of people. It is a fantasy that was at the heart of early Zionist propaganda, expressed in the famous slogan “A Land without people for a people without land.” In an attempt to scrutinize this and other myths about the state of Israel, acclaimed photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have produced a highly original visual analysis of contemporary Israel. In their images, nothing is as it seems. A watermelon is revealed to be a suicide bomb; a forest is actually a forensic investigation. Through this collection of simulated landscapes, buildings and objects, a new perspective on Israel begins to emerge.

This cryopreservation unit holds the bodies of Rhea and Elaine Ettinger, the mother and first wife of cryonics pioneer, Robert Ettinger. Robert, author of “The Prospect of Immortality” and “Man into Superman” is still alive.

The Cryonics Institute offers cryostasis (freezing) services for individuals and pets upon death. Cryostasis is practiced with the hope that lives will ultimately be extended through future developments in science, technology, and medicine. When, and if, these developments occur, Institute members hope to awake to an extended life in good health, free from disease or the aging process. Cryostasis must begin immediately upon legal death. A person or pet is infused with ice-preventive substances and quickly cooled to a temperature where physical decay virtually stops. The Cryonics Institute charges $28,000 for cryostasis if it is planned well in advance of legal death and $35,000 on shorter notice.

Submerged in a pool of water at Hanford Site are 1,936 stainless-steel nuclear-waste capsules containing cesium and strontium. Combined, they contain over 120 million curies of radioactivity. It is estimated to be the most curies under one roof in the United States. The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect which describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium. The temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit. The pool of water serves as a shield against radiation; a human standing one foot from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than 10 seconds. Hanford is among the most contaminated sites in the United States.

The National Center for Natural Products Research (NCNPR) is the only facility in the United States which is federally licensed to cultivate cannabis for scientific research. In addition to cultivating cannabis, NCNPR is responsible for analyzing seized marijuana for potency trends, herbicide residuals (paraquat) and fingerprint identification. NCNPR is licensed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and also researches and develops chemicals derived from plants, marine organisms, and other natural products.While 11 states have legalized the medical use of marijuana, a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision allows for the arrest of any individual caught using it for this purpose. Nearly half of the annual arrests for drug violations involve marijuana possession or trafficking.

The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), a division of the U.S. Library of Congress, provides a free national library program of Braille and recorded materials for blind and physically handicapped persons. Magazines included in the NLS’s programs are selected on the basis of demonstrated reader interest. This includes the publishing and distribution of a Braille edition of Playboy. Approximately 10 million American adults read Playboy every month, with 3 million obtaining it through paid circulation. It has included articles by writers such as Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, and Kurt Vonnegut and conducted interviews with Salvador Dali, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Malcolm X.

“…Any artist in any genre is striving to reflect as deep as possible a person’s inner world… I realized, quite unexpectedly for myself, that all these years I was doing one and the same thing and in essence I’m always interested in the same problems. Though I was making different types of films, all of them came to life for one reason — they had to tell about the inner duality of a human being. About his contradictory position between spirit and substance, between spiritual ideals and the necessity to exist in this material world.”

Andrey Tarkovsky is widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers in history. This beautifully produced, gem-like volume collects his extremely evocative and personal Polaroids, most of which feature his family and their most cherished settings-at home and in nature. Edited by Stephen Gill, who also contributes a text, this volume contains essays by leading critics; poems by Arseniy Tarkovsky; a text by Andrey A. Tarkovsky, his son; Andrey Tarkovsky’s own essay on photography; and a series of intimate Tarkovsky family photographs made during the 1930s by the Moscow poet Lev Gornung. In his text, Gill writes, “The images seem to dance between reality, the very being of their subject, and the photographer’s feeling for them. These images are descriptive documents, but they also speak for themselves, conveying something of Tarkovsky’s emotions. Tarkovsky’s photographs are wonderfully measured; his feet seem to be firmly on the ground, and yet he leaves space for his subjects to breathe, so he does not mute the essence.”